July 23, 2006

Will Shortz sets impossible puzzle on NPR

Will Shortz's word puzzle for last week (on NPR's Weekend Edition
Sunday) was to find a name from classical mythology that was, in
spelling, a concatenation of English pronouns. And the problem
was probably impossible. What's for sure is that the answer he
gave was not correct.

The answer was supposed to be Theseus, the name being
a concatenation of these and us. The latter for is
indeed the accusative form of the pronoun lexeme
we. But the former, these, is not a pronoun.

I'll be using the terminology of
The Cambridge
Grammar in explaining why, but this
isn't some sort of terminological quibble: there really are pronouns
in English, and they share certain very clear, sharp properties.
And the word these is not one of them, no matter which
system of terminology you prefer. The thing is that there are
syntactic differences in behavior between the two classes of words.

These is the plural inflected form of the lexeme
this, which is a determinative, specifically a member
of the demonstrative subclass of determinatives
(another subclass is the articles, the definite article
the and the indefinite article in its two shapes
an and a).

The lexeme this is one of the
special determinatives (like some and most, but not
the articles) that are permitted to function as simultaneously determiner and
head of a noun phrase. (There are some subtleties
to the argument; but see page 422 of
The Cambridge
Grammar for some crucial discussion.)
So that's why a form of this can occur on
its own where a noun phrase can occur (which is perhaps the root
of the confusion): This is typical has a subject noun phrase
consisting of only one word, which is both determiner and head of
the subject noun phrase.

Here, very briefly, are four lines of evidence for arguing that
these is a determinative, not a pronoun. The last one is
particularly telling, I think.

1. Third-person pronouns do not
co-occur in a noun phrase with a common noun
the way determinatives do:
the book is a (singular) noun phrase (and
the is a determinative); *it book is not a noun phrase
(and it is not a determinative).
[It must be noted here that
the pronouns we and you are
special in that they have additional uses as determinatives, in phrases
like we linguists or you boys; see page 374 of
The Cambridge
Grammar
for discussion. But this is special to just those two lexemes.
None of the 3rd person pronouns have second lives as determinatives
in Standard English (notice, these is 3rd person);
and none of the singular ones do;
and none of the reflexive ones like yourself do; and so on.
Don't be misled by How 'bout them apples? or them bones,
them bones gonna walk around; those are from non-standard
dialects where the shape of some items is different, and those
dialects have a determinative with the form of them and the
meaning of those. Tricky, isn't it?]

2. Pronouns do not in general allow modification by preceding
quantifiers: *every it, *all they, etc., are not
grammatical noun phrases.

3. Pronouns occur before the particle in verb-particle idioms, not after it:
Don't even bring it up in conversation (with the pronoun before
the particle up) is grammatical but *Don't even bring up it in conversation (with the pronoun following) is not.

4. A particularly salient point is that
pronouns occur in what are known as confirmatory tags: compare
Susan is clever, isn't she? (grammatical) with
*Susan is clever, isn't Susan? (not grammatical).

Now, by all four of the tests these facts make available,
these is a determinative, not a pronoun!

First, these books is a grammatical noun phrase (confirmation
of determinative status).

Second, all this and all these
are grammatical
(disconfirmation of pronoun status).

Third, Don't even bring up these
in conversation is grammatical
(disconfirmation of pronoun status).

There is lots of other evidence that could be brought to bear, but
this will do for a start. Sadly, Will Shortz did not consult Language
Log's capable staff before setting his puzzle, even though our rates
for non-profit organizations like National Public Radio are so
reasonable.

This is not the first
time, my friend Aaron Kaplan points out to me.
The New York Times crossword puzzle for last
December 30 had the clue "Lord's Prayer adjective," and the
answer is 3 letters long. The answer is supposed to be thy,
of course.
But thy is not an adjective. It is the genitive form of a
(now archaic) pronoun. It can be used as a determiner, just as
any other genitive noun phrase like
the children's can. Old-fashioned traditional grammars
insist that anything that can occur before the noun
in a noun phrase (or anything that can modify a noun) is an
"adjective", but that policy
gives you a class of "adjectives" infected with a diverse array
of members that have almost nothing syntactic or semantic
in common (I>London has to be an adjective because
of the phrase London fog, and so on).
As Aaron notes, the error here may be
the fault of the original puzzle author. But Shortz is ultimately in
charge, and is paid to be. This man needs a linguist on call.

Why do people neglect the
informational resources that are available to them? I do not know.
Shortz could have just called the main switchboard at Language Log Plaza and ask to be put through to the Lexical
Categorization Department in the Grammar Division.
(That's who Jon Stewart should have called before telling the
College of William and Mary that
terror
is not a noun. And who Microsoft should have called to learn
whether it was even remotely plausible to try and stipulate that
trademarks
should never be used in the possessive or the plural.)

I know, some of you will say that
this
earlier post, written when I was young, perhaps suggests a
certain lack
of sympathy with the whole puzzle genre, a mild prejudice against
the very idea of puzzles that inclines me to be mean to Will Shortz.
But no, I am perfectly
capable of maintaining a level head on this issue. Not everything
that Will Shortz bases his sometimes ingenious puzzles on is mistaken. But he is clearly drawing
his grammar information — just as nearly everyone else does
— from a
superficial grasp of what was printed in school grammars in the 19th
century. The subject has moved on. There is stuff you need to consider
if you are going to talk about grammar or invent puzzle clues that
make reference to grammar.

Others among you will say (as some have already said) that
unless Will Shortz had
got an accessible copy of The Cambridge Grammar, he had
only published dictionaries to go on, and they all say that these
can be a pronoun. True, they all do. But the point of view that I take
does not make grammar depend on authority. It depends on evidence.
Part of the tragedy of
the present state of English grammatical studies is that the published
resources aren't in line with the known evidence. In particular,
all published
dictionaries are simply wrong about the categories to which they
assign quite a few alleged pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives,
and conjunctions. All of them. It's a crisis.

And it isn't Will Shortz's
fault, of course. I don't expect him or
NPR to take the slightest bit of notice
of what I've said here. But this is Language Log. You get the actual
truth, and a glimpse of the evidence that backs it up. Plus a glimpse
of the extent to which what is commonly believed about English
grammar is at many points demonstrably incorrect.